The growth of the Internet has brought about a transformation in the protocols and business processes used by organizations to interact with and communicate with their customers or potential customers. Organizations that provide goods and/or services to consumers increasingly turn to workflow management systems to define or redefine their business processes in terms of workflow in order to be more accessible to their online customers, and to facilitate a more stream-lined and convenient mechanism with which to communicate with consumers, or to process data or other information within the organization.
Workflow generally refers to the movement of documents and/or tasks through a business process, or a set of logically related operations performed to accomplish a defined business objective. By incorporating the business process into a workflow process, the efficiency of the business process may be enhanced because the workflow process promotes consistency and adherence to policies by automatic enforcement of business procedures. A workflow process may be designed to achieve a particular end for an external customer, or to facilitate interaction and communication between internal individual units of an organization. Workflow processes are generally defined in terms of beginning and end units, and intervening activities, which, when logically linked together create the workflow process. Examples of workflow processes include managing a new service request, processing an incoming customer order, creating a marketing plan, or the like.
Workflow management systems permit organizations to define and control the various activities associated with a particular business process. A number of process-modeling techniques are available to define the sequence of routing and processing requirements of a typical workflow process and to facilitate the design and implementation of workflow capabilities within an organization. For example, a decision-chain process model comprises a technique that utilizes milestones and decision points to map out the workflow process, while an event-flow process model depicts the workflow process as a chain of manual and automatic rule-based events.
One type of workflow management system utilizes the Internet to implement workflow processes to achieve various business objectives, such as processing customer orders, managing customer service requests, and the like, for example. Systems utilizing the Internet to implement workflow capabilities typically use web clients and servers to deliver their functionality. One disadvantage associated with current Internet or web-based workflow management systems is that a relatively high level of skill may be required to develop and deploy elements of the workflow system. For example, implementation of a workflow process utilizing the Internet may require the independent development of web pages and/or java applications to create views or web pages to gather and manipulate information essential to the successful completion of the workflow process. Even with these skills, an organization is likely to see an increase in development time, maintenance costs, and the time required to make changes and enhancements to existing workflow processes when attempting to integrate these components with a workflow process produced with a workflow editing software application, for example. In addition, having a variety of independently constructed interfaces may cause difficulty in coordinating workflows across different execution environments, thereby necessitating specific training or computer programming skills to implement the desired workflow process.
In situations in which an organization has a large database of products, a complicated sales cycle comprising a large number of customized forms, pricing tables, and the like, or has other business practices in place with which they would like to integrate the electronic aspects of doing business over the Internet, for example, the level of skill required to implement a workflow process will increase in proportion to the complexity.